Michael Weinberg is a Vice President at Public Knowledge, a nonprofit digital advocacy group in Washington, DC. As part of that advocacy, Public Knowledge has pushed to introduce the concept of open source hardware to policymakers and Members of Congress. Michael oversees PK Thinks, Public Knowledge’s in-house thinktank and is involved in a wide range of issues focusing primarily on copyright, issues before the FCC, and emerging technologies such as 3D printing and open source hardware.

Gabreilla Levine, Vice President

Gabriella Levine is an artist and hardware designer interested in the relationship between technology and ecology. She studied Biology and Piano at Cornell University and Oberlin College, then worked doing Cancer Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine before abandoning the lab for the outdoors to become a wildland fire fighter based in Oregon. She holds a Masters degree from ITP, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. She creates sculptural and robotic works that mimic environmental phenomena and animal behavior. Works include Protei Inc (open source sailing drones), Sneel.cc (biomimetic swimming snake robots to sense environmental data), OCP (an open collaboration platform developing marine technologies). She often works out of Floating Point Collective, Brooklyn NY.

Since 2010, Levine has exhibited work internationally including Ars Electronica, MIT, Meta.Morf Electronic Arts Biennial (Norway), Eyebeam, Transnatural (Amsteradm), The Science Gallery (Dublin), and the American Museum of Natural History. She received the 2012 Prix Ars Electronica Hybrid Arts Award, the first Artist in Residence at Instructables, the 2012 Gulfstream Navigator Ocean Exchange Grant, and was a fellow of Unreasonable at Sea, a radical experiment circumnavigating the world by boat.

She teaches at ITP and CIID, and has presented globally at symposia and lectures including the Open Hardware Summit 2011 (NYC), Startup Festival (Bangalore), TEDx Navesink, and Unreasonable at State (US State Department). Her work has been written up in Wired, NYTimes, CNN, Vice, Scientific American and Hyperallergic.

Star Simpson

Star is an electrical engineer and maker, and has been excited to share knowledge about building things, especially out of electronics, for almost as long as she’s been learning about them. As a university student, Star was president of the MIT Electronic Research Society. She is enthusiastic to continue the mission as a member of the Open Source Hardware Association.

Emile Petrone

Emile is the CEO & founder of Tindie. Founded in 2012, Tindie has quickly become the marketplace for finding unique and specialized hardware products from small businesses. Tindie has launched over 1,000 products through a growing community in over 60 countries. Emile is a self-taught engineer based in Mountain View, CA.

Jeff holds an MS from MIT and a BA in Architecture from Yale University, and spent much of that time working with artist/technologist Natalie Jeremijenko, building robotic dogs and stuff. To find out more, visit Unterbahn.com.

Photo Credit: Christina Xu

David Mellis

David is a graduate student in the High-Low Tech group at the MIT Media Lab and co-founder of the Arduino project. Before coming to MIT, he earned a master’s at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea and taught at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design.

Toni Klopfenstein

Toni is currently a quality assurance engineer for SparkFun Electronics. She has been working to share and improve open-source electronics and science projects with the community both as a technical support representative at SparkFun, and as a K-12 outreach coordinator for the Women in Engineering program at CU-Boulder. With a strong background in open-source software from the CU-Boulder Applied Mathematics program and her extensive hardware experience at Sparkfun, Toni is passionate about growing and strengthening the open-source movement on all fronts.

Rose Swan Meacham

Rose is a creative technologist and neuroscientist, specializing in visual art and interactive design. She is interested in visual perception and studies the causes of attention selection to develop computational models for human gaze behavior in complex environments and tasks. Her research uses high speed cameras and computer vision to create non-invasive measures, all of which are open source online. A strong supporter of Citizen Science and Open Access, she helped researchers at CERN, NYU, Columbia, and Princeton share their research through crowdsourcing.

She has a Bachelor’s in Psychology and Photography from Bard College, and a Master’s from NYU Tisch in the Interactive Telecommunication Program. She is currently a Research Assistant at the Center for Neural Science at New York University and is conducting a new experiment on narrative at Princeton University.

Addie Wagenknecht, Co-Chair, Open Hardware Summit (2013-2014)

Addie Wagenknecht completed a Masters at New York University as a Wasserman Scholar and shortly after held fellowships at Eyebeam Atelier, CultureLab UK and more recently at HyperWerk Institute for Post-Industrial Design as well as Carnegie Mellon University STUDIO for Creative Inquiry. She is currently a Mozilla Open(art) Fellow, an artist at Free Art and Technology Lab a.k.a. F.A.T. Lab as well as co-founder of NORTD labs who created the open source lasercutter Lasersaur. Addie is a professor in robotics and open source computation at the institut für experimentelle architektur hochbau at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Wagenknecht’s research, collaborations and projects are documented in a number of academic papers, books and magazines such as the Economist, Forbes, Popular Mechanics, MIT Technology Review, Gizmodo, Slashdot, Engadget, Heise, ARTnews and Der Standard.

Honorary Board Members

Danese Cooper

Danese has a long history of advocacy for open-source, earning her the nickname “Open Source Diva”. She is a Board Member at Drupal Association, an Open Source Strategist (consulting) at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, an Emeritus Board Member / Observer at Open Source Initiative (OSI), and a Member at The Apache Software Foundation. Previously, she was Chief Technical Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation and, for six years, an open source advocate at Sun Microsystems.

Nathan Seidle

Nathan is the CEO of SparkFun Inc. in Boulder, Colorado, a company he founded in 2003 as an undergraduate student in electrical engineering. His vision for SparkFun was a website that showed multiple views of each product, linked to the datasheet, and contained tutorials on everything they sell. The company has grown to over 130 employees in the past 9 years and is one of the leaders in Open Source Hardware. In addition to the parts company, Nathan also invented a system for printing small runs of circuits boards efficiently with BatchPCB, a sister company within SparkFun. At heart, Nathan is an electrical engineer and continues to build, hack, and design many of the companies’ products.

Wendy Seltzer

Wendy is a Fellow with Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, previously a fellow with Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy; the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado; and with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. She was a Visiting Fellow with the Oxford Internet Institute, teaching a joint course with the Said Business School, Media Strategies for a Networked World. She has previously taught at American University’s Washington College of Law, Brooklyn Law School, and Northeastern University School of Law, and served as staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Before joining EFF, she taught Internet Law as an adjunct professor at St. John’s University School of Law, and practiced intellectual property and technology litigation at Kramer Levin in New York.